Exhibition dates: 18th August 2016 – 19th March 2017

I will be limiting my postings to one every 5 days because I am resting my injured hands.

From the lineage of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White merges the work of Milton Rogovin, an artist who I had never heard of before. It is a blessing in my life that I do now. His gift to us, his job of seeing, was to document the lives of blue collar workers, working class neighbourhoods and multi-ethnic communities.

“Rogovin shed light on important social issues of the time: the plight of miners; the decline of the once-robust steel industry in upstate New York; the everyday struggles of the poor and working class in Buffalo, New York, where he lived. He spent more than three decades creating naturalistic portraits of the working class in the Lower West Side of Buffalo, photographing people in their homes, at work, and on the street.” He produced, “compelling narratives of the people he photographed. He believed deeply in photography’s ability to be an agent of social change.” Yes!

He was a social-documentary photographer and proud of it.

His powerful, classical portraits, often grouped in diptychs and triptychs, expound narrative in a single image and over time. They compress time intimately… and by that I mean the viewer is engaged in a conversation with the subject, where we can imagine that we live those lives AS THEY DO (transcending time), the lives of what Rogovin called “the forgotten ones.” He makes their countenance, their physicality, the hardships they endure, and their narrative, directly and intimately compelling. We are made to feel their plight (unlike so much contemporary photography) in the now and the forever. For these photographs are as relevant, if not more so, now as then.

The world needs artists like Rogovin, gifted and attentive image makers who possess a social conscience. Image makers who live, and picture, their egalitarian ideals. Respect.

Marcus

Definition of egalitarianism1: a belief in human equality especially with respect to social, political, and economic affairs.
2: a social philosophy advocating the removal of inequalities among people.

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Many thankx to the San Jose Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

In the early 1970s, Milton Rogovin set out to document the neighbourhood near his house. He made a series of portraits of working-class people in Buffalo’s Lower West Side. Then he returned to photograph the same people in the early 1980s and again in the 1990s. The result is this remarkable and moving portrait of time and place in America. Here are fifty of an acclaimed photographer’s engaging Triptychs – a visual chronicle of change, ageing, endurance, and finally survival. As Robert Coles writes in his foreword, “These photographs constitute a major contribution to the American documentary tradition. They represent the insistence of one careful, gifted, attentive photographer upon seeing through, as it were, his self-assigned job of seeing.” Here we see working people who, like most Americans, find partners, have children and grandchildren, sometimes separate, and sometimes die early. Some age considerably in the ten years between photographs, others almost not at all. Some lose children, change partners and houses, and some visibly change lifestyles. What remains constant is the passing of time and its effects upon his subjects, so evident in Rogovin’s work. These are among the themes observed and discussed in Stephen Jay Gould’s illuminating introduction.

Milton Rogovin (1909-2011) was proud to call himself a “social-documentary photographer.” For more than four decades, he photographed those whom he referred to as “the forgotten ones.” He was working as an optometrist in Manhattan in the early 1930s when he became increasingly involved in leftist causes. Distressed by the rampant social upheaval and widespread poverty caused by the Great Depression, Rogovin attended night classes sponsored by the New York Workers School and became an advocate for social equity. He read the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker and was introduced to the social-documentary photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. In 1957, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose hearings had led to the blacklisting and public persecution of many artists. A year later, he devoted himself full-time to photography: his art became the vehicle for his egalitarian ideals.

Drawn entirely from the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, this exhibition presents thirty-eight photographs from three series: “Lower West Side, Buffalo” (1972-84), “Working People” (1976-87), and “Family of Miners” (1988-89). Rogovin shed light on important social issues of the time: the plight of miners; the decline of the once-robust steel industry in upstate New York; the everyday struggles of the poor and working class in Buffalo, New York, where he lived. He spent more than three decades creating naturalistic portraits of the working class in the Lower West Side of Buffalo, photographing people in their homes, at work, and on the street. He later photographed in places such as Appalachian towns in Alabama, Kentucky, and West Virginia; Isla Negra, Chile; and later in China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Scotland, Spain, and Zimbabwe. He photographed miners in many of these places and created the series “Family of Miners.”

Life and Labor marks the public debut of these photographs, which were gifted to the Museum’s collection in 2011. Rogovin often grouped his pictures into diptychs and triptychs to produce compelling narratives of the people he photographed. He believed deeply in photography’s ability to be an agent of social change. In addition to their aesthetic value, Rogovin’s photographs serve as important records of the changing working class neighbourhoods and multi-ethnic communities he documented over the course of many decades, until well into his 90s. Rogovin’s powerful and provocative portraits raise questions that remain equally prescient today, amid current concerns over employment and income gaps.

“Rogovin believed deeply in photography’s ability to be an agent of social change,” said Marja van der Loo, curatorial assistant at SJMA and curator of the exhibition. “In addition to their aesthetic value, his photographs represent his egalitarian ideals and serve as important records of the changing neighbourhoods and communities he documented over the course of many decades.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes the Art Blart blog which reviews exhibitions in Melbourne, Australia and posts exhibitions from around the world. He has a Dr of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne and is currently studying a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne.